Category: bookshelfies

bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: Reorganisation o’clock

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Well hello everyone, happy Saturday. Now you may remember a few weeks back, I posted a picture of my newest bookshelf – up on the attic mini-landing. And having move a bunch of books up to that, that means I have some space on the downstairs bookshelves and now I have to do a(nother) rearrange. So these are the gappy before photos – I don’t have an after yet, but trust me it will come!

So you may recognise these two – this is the mostly mystery shelf and the twentieth century mystery shelf, but now the Agatha Christies and the Margery Allinghams are upstairs and there’s some space… The piles of books you see are a couple of books that my dad wants to read, a few that my sister wants to read and then some books that I need to find homes for amid the reshuffle – whether that’s in here or in the back room!

Now this is one that you won’t recognise – and it’s always been a bit of chaos but not like the chaos shelves out back, because the books are mostly hardbacks and mostly really quite new. It’s next to the nice hardback pile and you may notice that some of the books formerly on that pile are now on the shelf. And you’ll also spot a bit of duplication from the first photo, because yes, I own False Value twice – in signed hardback and in paperback. The Hardback is because I went to an event for the book launch with Ben Aaronovitch and wanted it signed as a memento, but I thought I would carry on buying in paperback to match the rest of my Rivers of London collection. So that’s what I did, except I’ve kept buying the hardbacks as the new ones have come out, and I couldn’t keep buying the paperbacks as well because that would be silly. So now I have to figure out what I’m going to do longer term about getting them all in the same place. And I have a bit of the same issue with Curtis Sittenfeld – when I first read her it was a proof copy of Eligible in giant paperback, then I went back for her previous books which were all in paperback and I’ve bought all the new stuff in hardback. So they don’t match, they aren’t the same size and my organisational instincts are at war: on the one hand, I want all the books by the same author together, but on the other, the different sizes look messy and mean than they have to go on a taller shelf and the paperbacks don’t need the headroom and I have other tall books that need the shelf space.

So I think you’re probably getting the idea that the reason that this doesn’t have any after pictures because this has the potential to turn into something really massive on the reorganisation front. And that makes me nervous. And it would make Him Indoors nervous if I told him about it. Which I haven’t and I won’t. It could also turn into another one of those moments where I do a bit of what my mum calls a rationalisation, but what other people might call a cull, aka getting rid of some books. I already only keep stuff that I think I’m going to want to read again or that has some sort of significance for me, but every time I do a reorganise I do try to reassess the books on the shelves and whether my feelings about them have changed. And sometimes they have and so off they go to the charity shop so that someone else can love them as much as I have. I may or may not tell you which ones go, and you may not be able to tell all of the choices that I make, because as you have discovered today, although I’ve posted a lot of pictures of my bookshelves, I’ve never shown you all of them and all the pictures have been taken at slightly different times and things move and they move often! I will keep you posted though…

Have a great weekend!

books, bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: New bookcase!

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For today’s treat, I offer you the new attic staircase bookshelf. I said a few months ago that I was looking for one, and now I have it! This is a second hand oak bookcase, probably 1950s-ish and came from the vintage warehouse place. At the moment it’s a mix of Trisha Ashley, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, British Library Crime Classics and cozy crime. But the aim is to have stuff on there that people sleeping in the spare room might want to read so that may yet change. And it means that I now have space downstairs to do a bit of rearranging. So watch this space…

books, bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: My next project

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This is exactly what the title says it is – this is where I want my next bookshelf. This is the gap at the top of the stairs into the spare room. As you can see, at the moment, it’s currently the home to the Trisha Ashley books, which are in heaps because I couldn’t be bothered to put them all back shelf-style after I did the measuring up. I was hoping it was going to be a little antique bookshelf that I find somewhere in a shop or one of those vintage markets but I’ve been looking for a while and haven’t found anything yet, so maybe I’m going to have to find a carpenter to make some for me. In which case I’ll have to decide if I want it to go the whole way up (probably) which would mean relocating the Matilda poster (still can’t believe that original run at the RSC is so long ago) and probably rehanging all the theatre posters on that stairway – of which there are a few (half a dozen) and would mean doing some tidying up to hide the marks and would probably lead to redecorating the lot. So maybe I need to ask you to cross your fingers that I find a delightful little bookshelf in a shop soon that I can just slot in there. I already had a set of shelves here in mind – with some of the cozy crime series that are outgrowing their space on the downstairs shelves and because they’re mass market maybe not the best use of space on the bookcase they are in – but when my sister suggested that a bookshelf with a tempting selection for guests would be a good idea and that seemed like a good plan too. So who knows what will actually end up on there. And yes as you know, the spare room does have a bookshelf but as it’s slightly chaotic overspill and where books live is partly determined by how often I might want to use them, the travel books definitely live the furthest away from me and so any potential new bookshelf should be for books I might want more often than that. Which brings me back to cozies and romances. And I promise that the logic of all this makes sense to me, even if it might seem crazy to you!

Happy Saturday everyone!

books, bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: Spare room

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Long time readers will recognise this bookshelf – it use to be the to-read shelf back at the old house.* Or at least one of the to-read shelves… Anyway, in this house (I can’t call it the new house any more because we’ve been here since before the pandemic and that’s like another lifetime) it lives in the spare bedroom and it’s a mix of stuff I don’t need very often – like the travel books – stuff I can’t bring myself to part with – like the French language stuff from uni – single issue comics, coffee table books and a small selection of books that don’t belong anywhere else or that might be of interest to anyone sleeping in that room. That’s why you can see stuff like The Night Circus, Confessions of a Southern Lady, Finn and Lady and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? on there. It’s not the neatest or most coherent – and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post it at all – but hey, I have my reputation to maintain of having bookshelves everywhere so I’ve just gone for it and leaned into the chaos of it all. I’m sure everyone has an equivalent thing – whether it’s a drawer or a cupboard stuff with oddments related to their hobbies!

Have a great Saturday!

*yes I tried to find a picture of it back then, but for some reason WordPress wasn’t showing me any… whether that’s a glitch or whether it’s because the site design has changed since then, who knows and I’m probably not going to investigate!

books, bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: An extra shelf

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Remember how I said I was running out of of space? Well this is my solution. I had a metal book end that I was using on the children’s book shelf upstairs – but that’s now got to a point where it doesn’t need it, so I’ve taken the opportunity to do some reorganising and create a new shelf!

So here you are. And obviously the main issue is that it’s already full. But this does mean I have made some space on other shelves that I can now fill up. So I’ve moved the Kate Andersen Brower books so they’re together – three were in the front room and one was on the bottom shelf of this bookshelf and it’s basically a selection of hardbacks and difficultly sized books from other shelves which means that it’s created more space than you would expect. So we have some Pink Carnation hardbacks, the Richard Coles and the latest Richard Osman along with The Last Hero, a Diane Mott Henry, Hello World, a Paul Charles and my Mallory Towers omnibus from when I was at primary school. And now I have some options for reorganising. So watch this space!

books, bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: Random Girl’s Own hardbacks

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You know I think this might be the very last shelf you haven’t seen*! And given that I’ve been telling you that I’m planning a reorganisation, maybe means that this is my cue to actually pull my finger out and do it. Although I do need some more shelves to do this properly. Anyway, here you see a very random selection of hardback Girl’s Own or Gir’ls Own adjacent hardbacks. Some of them are truly terrible – I’m looking at you The Girls of Dancy Dene – some of them are by authors that I keep elsewhere, including my only two hardback Elinor M Brent-Dyers. Why only two? Well because I already own all the Chalet School books at least once, mostly twice and I can’t bring myself to get rid of either set, so the chances of me getting rid of any if I get a set of hardbacks is small, even if we don’t think about how much that would cost. Anyway, this is a little shelf in the bottom of one of my built ins – down the room from all the fancy hardbacks, Viragos and downstairs Pratchetts – but the shelves above it are glass and not wood and they are used for my bits of antique silver. Because that’s the sort of person I am.

*apart from the to-read bookshelf, which I’m not sure I’m brave enough to expose in full. I’ll think on it.

bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: The Chaos Shelves – part three

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Is this the most mixed up shelf of them all? I think so. This is an insane mix of non fiction, cozy crime, historical crime and romantic comedies. You can see a couple of hardback Meg Langslows, a few previous BotWs – like A Kim Jong-Il Production, The Rest of Us Just Live Here, The Year of Living Danishly and Sorcerer to the Crown.

In fact, thinking about it this might be the shelf with the highest amont of recommended books of any of them because the back row has Euny Hong, Negroland, the Unfinished Palazzo, Swan Song, Underground Railroad, Somewhere Inside of Happy, A Very Big House in the Country, A Dangerous Crossing and The Madwoman Upstairs. And why is that? Well it’s because this is where the hardbacks and larger books that I want to keep but that don’t belong with anything else live – and why do I want to keep stuff usually? Because it’s good. And a lot of these are non fiction or books where I don’t own other stuff by the same author, so they don’t have another logical home to go to. So there it is. It still needs reorganising though…

bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: The Chaos Shelves – part two

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As I said in the first Chaos Shelves post, this is where it all gets a bit bonkers and disorganised. The backwards hardbacks are three of the later Pink Carnation novels – the paperbacks of some of the others are on the back shelf. There’s an Aunty Lee book – and there’s another on the shelf behind. The Residence is here – even though the other Kate Andersen Brower books are in the front room on the Hardback no-fiction shelf. There are the computer games. A couple of Claire Sandy books, a couple of Jill Shalvis ones – and a few more on the back shelf. Behind them there are some old favourite Katie Ffordes, then the Deanna Raybourn Lady Julia Grey‘s that I own in paperback and a couple of Tracy Grants. I’ve owned that Mallory Towers omnibus since I was about 10, but it won’t fit on the children’s book shelves – in fact there are some more children’s books behind as well – the Carbonel series, Mr Majeika, the Flower Fairies and one of The Beat series that all returned to me from mum and dad’s attic when we moved into this house three years ago. I don’t quite know why we still have that Sport book, except that it was given to Him Indoors and given how few of the books in this house are his I feel bad about getting rid of any of his. There’s former Recommendsday pick Standard Deviation and some old computer games. Oh and there’s another copy of Gone with the Windsors on the back shelf – that I wish I’d found a couple of weeks ago, because mum wanted to read it again and ended up buying her own copy… Basically this is a bookshelf in very great need of a good sort out, except that I don’t know where I’m going to put the stuff if they’re not here!

bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: The Chaos Shelves – part one

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Oh, ho ho Merry Christmas We’ve reached the bits of my bookshelves that I try not to pay too much attention to, because they are such a state. I keep telling myself that I’m going to sort them out, and then losing the will to live and giving up on it until I add some more bookshelves to the house! This one actually starts fairly well – you can’t see it on the photo but the back row is actually very neat and is mostly seriesand that spills over to the front where as you can see I have the Lady Sherlock and Charlotte Holmes series. Behind them are the Steph Plums and the rest of the Janet Evanovich collection and then the Christina Jones, Melissa Nathan and the bits of Susan Elizabeth Philips’ Chicago Stars series that I own in paper. The the rest of the front is odds and ends of things that don’t have a better home to go to – a Paul Charles that doesn’t match the rest of the set in format, size or design. Odds and ends in paperback and bits of series that won’t fit elsewhere. But it could be worse… and that is yet to come.

bookshelfies

Bookshelfie: Modern (mostly) Middle Grade

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We’re getting to a point now where there aren’t a lot of nice neat and tidy shelves for me to show you before we get to what I think of as the Chaos Shelves. But then as I’ve been promising all year that I’m planning to reorganise some of the shelves and show you the results, then at least you’ll have seen the before and after when it happens. Anyway, I don’t imagine that this shelf will change much in any reorganisation. This is the bookshelf in the back spare bedroom. This has mostly been my office over the last nearly two years, but it’s also where any young people who might stay with us would sleep, so it made sense to use the shelves in there (left by the previous owners, who used it as their kids bedroom) for books suitable for any young people who might stay, and it also tends to be where the graphic novel end of my book collection ends up. And there are quite a few familiar books on here – recent BotW Piglettes, Bloodlust and Bonnet and The Unforgettable Guinevere St Clair and less recent BotWs The Good Thieves, Carry On and Pumpkinheads. There’s also various series that have come up at various points – like the Wells and Wong books that I own in paperback, the Lumberjanes and Fence graphic novels and the Tiffany Aching novels from the Discworld series. It’s starting to look a little full, but I’m not sure there’s anything here that I’m prepared to get rid of, so when it gets full it’s likely to be a case of moving stuff to other places rather than a rationalisation situation…